Conviction's Love Story

After her brother was convicted of a murder Betty Anne Waters knew he didn't commit, she devoted the next 18 years to proving his innocence. Her mission succeeded, so spectacularly that it's the subject of a new biopic—though what happened next was too shocking for the big screen

I first saw Betty Anne Waters from a distance, waiting her turn at a podium at the Innocence Project's fundraising dinner in the cavernous luxury eatery Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan. She was remarkable as the lone white female among two dozen mostly black male "exonerees"—wrongly convicted people sprung from prison after the Innocence Project forced courts to apply DNA testing to their cases.

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Waters, a trim, fiftysomething with a northeastern drawl to outdo the Kennedys', wasn't an exoneree. An unadorned woman in a simple black pantsuit, she was onstage to speak for her brother Kenny, who spent 18 years in Massachusetts state prison for a murder he didn't commit. He was released because of his sister's superhuman quest to prove his innocence—though what happened next is the kind of wildly random, cruel twist of fate that might make even the most ardent believer question the existence of God.

But before the ending, the beginning. Betty Anne and Kenny's story, the subject of a movie out now called Conviction, starring Hilary Swank, begins in rural 1960s Massachusetts, where they were two of nine children of more than one father left to their own devices by a neglectful, passionate mother (to put it kindly, which is the way Betty Anne tells me she prefers it be put; their mom died last year). Only a year apart, Betty Anne and Kenny formed a tight little posse with two other siblings, and the four went from playing hide-and-seek on their grandfather's vegetable farm, where they lived with their mom in a cottage, to skipping school and breaking into houses for fun. Kenny was Betty Anne's protector, she was the adoring little sis; he was the extroverted prankster, she was the more cautious straight man. In Kenny, Betty Anne had instant entertainment; in Betty Anne, Kenny had an appreciative audience. And when Kenny got into serious trouble, his number one fan was always there for him.

When Betty Anne was 12 and Kenny 13, the state removed all nine children from their mother's custody. "[Kenny and I] were devastated, totally devastated," Betty Anne says when I talk to her in a Manhattan restaurant. (The movie captured the feeling of their parting exactly right, she adds: The two children are shown clinging to each other as adults wrench them apart.) For the next three years, Betty lived in a series of foster homes, while Kenny landed in reform school. Eventually the large brood were returned to their mother, but Kenny's troubles continued and Betty Anne dropped out of school in the eleventh grade. She married a realtor in her midtwenties and then quickly gave birth to two boys, whom she stayed home to raise. Meanwhile, Kenny's antics weren't nearly so quotidian: heavy drinking, bar fights, brushes with the law. He moved back to their grandfather's farm, working nights at a diner. One of his girlfriends had his only child, a girl.

In 1982, at the age of 29, Kenny was arrested and charged with the brutal slaying of a neighbor in the Massachusetts hamlet of Ayer. There were no witnesses or solid physical evidence to link him to the crime—only the statements of a pair of disgruntled ex-girlfriends, one the mother of his daughter, who testified that he'd told them he killed the female victim.

While her brother had a long history of arrests, Betty Anne knew he wasn't a killer. "Kenny drank; trouble could follow Kenny," she says, pausing and lowering her voice. "He had very bad luck." Just not the kind of trouble and bad luck that included slashing and bashing a 48-year-old mother to death in her own trailer home with a knife and a toaster. Kenny was sentenced to life without parole.

By 1985, Betty Anne had moved to Florida with her husband and sons, but she got calls from Kenny in prison every few days. Then she didn't hear from him for a month; finally, his attorney called with the news: Kenny's last appeal with the Massachusetts Supreme Court had been denied, and he'd been put in isolation after trying to kill himself. "When I finally did talk to Kenny, I was so upset, so mad," Betty Anne says. "He told me he didn't have any hope left, but the one thing that might give him hope is if I was to go to law school and become his attorney. I said it'd take forever. He said, `I can wait forever if I know you're doing that.'

"I really didn't have a choice," she says now. In the beginning, she wasn't even sure she could get through college, but she agreed because she believed that it was her effort—the sheer effort—that stood between Kenny and suicide. She'd once batted around the idea of being a lawyer, though not very seriously. "I was through the court system so much with the foster homes. The nun who gave me a ride home to my mother's house at the end asked me, `What do you want to do, Betty Anne?' And we had this conversation about me becoming a lawyer."

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It took Betty Anne 13 years to make good on her promise. Moving back up north, she got an associates degree at the Community College of Rhode Island, then a master's in education at Rhode
Island College, before finally entering Roger Williams University School of Law. Almost to the day that she graduated from community college, her husband left her, accusing her of, among other things, loving her brothers and sisters more than him. A few years later, her then 10- and 12-year-old sons decided they'd rather live with their dad than change schools to stay with their mother, who'd moved to be closer to her college. That loss kicked off a yearlong depression, Betty Anne says, during which she nearly gave up on her goal. But with Kenny's encouragement, she roused herself to cram for the LSAT.

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New Haven public defender Abra Rice was Betty Anne's best friend in law school, both women having enrolled as older students. "She is understated and doesn't brag," Rice says, "but she's very smart." During the years she was in law school, Betty Anne worked at a bar called Aidan's Pub and for a while was engaged to marry the owner. The two never made it to the aisle but remain "best friends," she says, and she's now the bar's business manager and co-owner.

Midway through law school, Betty Anne read about the Innocence Project, a nonprofit started by lawyers Peter Neufeld and O. J. Simpson "dream teamer" Barry Scheck to ask courts to reconsider convictions using DNA evidence. "Until then," Betty Anne says, "I didn't have a clue how I was going to [prove him innocent]. Staying in school was giving him hope, but I was actually anxious about what would happen when I graduated."

She called the Innocence Project and was told Kenny would be put on a long waiting list and his case accepted only if evidence had been preserved. Pretending to be writing a research paper, Betty Anne and a couple of classmates began calling the clerk of courts in Boston. At first, the office insisted that everything had been destroyed, but after months of haranguing, Betty Anne persuaded a clerk to search the storeroom, where she found a box labeled waters. Betty Anne, who'd passed the bar by this point, raced up to Boston and opened the box. Without daring to touch anything for fear of contaminating it, she saw a bloody piece of curtain and knife—bits of evidence ripe for DNA testing. "My heart was pounding so hard I felt you could hear it," Betty Anne recalls. The next morning, she asked the court to officially preserve the box's contents and called Scheck, who agreed to act as cocounsel.

Two years later, Kenny and Betty Anne walked out of the Boston courthouse into a scrum of TV cameras and microphones, both grinning from ear to ear. DNA testing had shown that the perpetrator couldn't have been Kenny Waters. (The crime is now unsolved; DNA testing has not turned up any new suspects.)

Here, the movie ends; the final shot shows Kenny sitting on a picnic bench at Betty Anne's house, having his first morning cup of joe as a free man and watching the mist evaporating from a pond. Hollywood being Hollywood, Conviction takes many liberties with the depiction of Betty Anne and Kenny. There are only the two of them in the film, not nine kids crammed into a ramshackle cottage; their mother is portrayed as 1960s sexy, svelte, and attractive. But what happened to Kenny post-prison the filmmakers ignored completely.

The first three months, he lived with Betty Anne, then moved in with another sibling who lived nearer to the rest of his family, trying to reconnect with his many relatives. That summer of 2001 "was the best time of his life," Betty Anne says, although the shadow of the wasted years cast a pall. Nearly two decades of incarceration hadn't erased Kenny's exuberance, but Betty Anne says she saw hints of depression looming as he realized his freedom came without the usual midlife milestones: the homes, the cars, and the children his siblings enjoyed.

On September 6, 2001, Kenny was having dinner with his mother and a brother at a local Chinese restaurant, when he decided to run home to see if his nephews and nieces wanted him to bring them some food. Taking a shortcut, he hoisted himself over a fence that collapsed, pitching him down 15 feet, where he hit his head on a cement foundation. A neighbor heard him fall and called an ambulance; he died 13 days later, just six months after his sister and her newly minted law degree brought him home.

It's been nine years, but Betty Anne still cries talking about Kenny's death. "Oh yeah. We miss him. Yeah. Sometimes I can talk about it better than other times," she says, taking a deep breath and wiping her eyes. Her brother was physically absent during his time in prison, but he'd become a kind of family counselor from his jail phone—his death left a gaping hole. "Kenny helped a lot of people in the family through problems," Betty Anne says. "Half the time, you wouldn't know he was behind bars. He was very patient."

Director Tony Goldwyn says early scripts of the movie included Kenny's death, but he decided it detracted from the story that captivated him in the first place. "What I wanted it to be about wasn't whether Betty Anne was able to get him out or whether he was innocent, but about the fact that these two people loved each other so much," Goldwyn says. "People were overwhelmed by the death."

Though she is licensed to practice in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, Betty Anne has zero interest in working as a lawyer, having won the single case that mattered to her. She does occasionally speak to policymakers about the Innocence Project and judicial
reform. The movie, she reckons, won't change much about her life, although it has extended her proverbial 15 minutes. "Kenny would be so excited about the movie, and he'd love Sam Rockwell [who plays him]. He really captured Kenny."

She's pleased with the Hilary Swank version of Betty Anne Waters too. "I think she did a good job. It does feel so weird. I watch her and I forget she's playing me. That character makes me sad. And then I think, That character's me."